Improved transfer and repurchase workflows
Today, Carta is releasing improved workflows for transfers and repurchases.
The new transfer and repurchase workflows have a new look and feel, include user experience improvements, and most importantly, address some of the fundamental challenges around cap table data and reporting for our corporate customers.
Capturing more information for reporting
The new transfer and repurchase workflows will now capture sale information, and in the transfer workflow specifically, changes to beneficial ownership. Capturing this information allows Carta to accurately track changes to disposition and cost basis, which lays the groundwork for features like disqualifying disposition and secondary transaction reports (among other things).
Structuring unstructured data
Both new workflows now allow company administrators to structure their transactional data by tagging transfers and repurchases with specific reasons such as “Buyback” (a repurchase reason) and “Secondary” (a transfer reason). Previously, these were both listed as certificate cancellation reasons and together accounted for close to 20% of all certificate cancellations on Carta.
Transfer reasons:
Repurchase reasons:
Preventing broken cap tables
What wasn’t immediately obvious was that reflecting a buyback as a cancellation or a secondary sale as a cancellation of sold shares followed by an issuance of purchased shares would effectively break the links between certificates in the history of transactionally-related certificates. In other words, customers were unknowingly introducing problems in their cap table data and reports by reflecting transactions using the cancellation tool. More information on this topic can be found in this Carta support article.
Providing a better user experience
We strove to not only address the challenges described above, we also wanted to provide better experience for our company administrators using the transfer and repurchase tools in Carta.
Admins now see the original certificate being transferred or repurchased directly in the workflow:
The “copy from original” button in the transfer workflow saves admins time by copying over the Rule 144 date, Rule 144 reason, and the legend from the original certificate:
Updated support articles for transferring and repurchasing shares can be found in the links below:
